Nemes János: Healing Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)
If you are in Need of Hospital Treatment
When’s Mummy coming? sand, and special operations may be as much as sixty thousand. The most elementary diagnostics cost a minimum of one thousand forints, more complicated ones fifteen thousand. The minimum fee for a medium-scale operation involving a three days’ stay and average services is forty to fifty thousand forints. There is one other thing Westerners find unusual. “Respect the doctor, because thou shalt need him,” Ecclesiastes writes. “He was created by God on high. And he shall be awarded by the king.” This thousand- year-old piece of wisdom is untrue in Hungary. The average salary of Hungarian doctors is extremely low even though prices are generally lower here than in Western Europe. This explains why it is customary to give doctors a tip. This equals the total medical wages in Hungary, although, no one knows the exact figure. Needless to say, this “financial policy” causes a lot of strain in the society of doctors and the medical services. We cannot attempt to describe Budapest’s hospital services whose standards vary enormously. Even within a single institution the differences between professional conditions and conditions of treatment are great. Therefore we would like to introduce the most important clinics and give some basic information about the medical university. 28
